Chapter 4

If the principles of tragedy, comedy and satire are as implicit in our psychology now as when Aristotle described them, and if the principles of decorum, of art, and of the timeless and the impersonal in art, are as rooted in life as they are declared to be, there might seem to be no great need to preach them; the practice of literature would disclose them in spite of our ignorance. Try as we might to make a lovable hero out of an inferior character, he would still emerge a figure in satire or, if we generalized his faults, a figure in comedy; in serious literature, only a character better than in real life would give satisfaction. Though we do not doubt that the principles of art will thus be rediscovered pragmatically by the unescapable discipline of literature, yet it is something of a pity to go through such lengths of experiment in order to find out what was known before. And the great danger in our country is that we may not push the experiment to the tedious but profitable end at which sound knowledge awaits us; we may grow weary of the discipline, and take refuge in parody or in sentimentality. These two avenues of escape from the problem have cursed American literature before, and signs are not wanting that they now are the temptations of those who yesterday were our “new” writers and promised brave things. Face to face with characters worse than in actual life, we may find our own satiric attitude monotonous, but to handle such material otherwise than satirically, we must master the art of comedy, and comedy is an art too difficult. What Bret Harte and Riley and Eugene Field did in such circumstances was to obscure the meanness of the subject by sentimentality, instead of illuminating it by the comic spirit. Spoon River has been celebrated before, though we may not have recognized the subject with the old sentimental surface removed; much of our contemporary satire has been the kind of surgical operation necessary to separate the American reader from the sentimentality which in his heart he likes. Since it is in his heart, he may express it again quite shamelessly, this time as a protest against too much satire, and we may have another welter of old oaken buckets and old swimming holes and little boy blues—the literature that provides the satisfaction of a good cry, without the over-exertion of tragic pity or terror. Already we have again the familiar and dilettante essay, the imitation of eighteenth-century style, even in newspaper columns, the interminable parodies of Horace, which in this country have been the advance signals of the sentimental wave.

We can but hope that the signs may prove deceptive, and that literature in America will not wait much longer for the characters and subjects proper to it, and proper to the dramatic hour we live in—characters and subjects expressing that better part of us which has given our land its direction and its power, and expressing also that other world of the spirit which man builds for elbow-room to exercise his genuine ideals in, and carries it around with him, and sets it up to be a tabernacle in the wilderness of this natural world.

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